Honestly, the lack of dedicated controls will never allow for mobile gaming to be anything more than a time diversion for most people. A touchscreen just isn't something that's comfortable to use for extended lengths of time, in my opinion at least.
The lack of dedicated controls is only a negative for games that require precise inputs (like classic arcade games). There are so many fantastic games that don't require that at all. Strategy, turn-based RPGs, puzzles, adventure games, etc. For certain games, a touchscreen can blow dedicated controls out of the water if the interface is designed well.
Not sure what the issue is. I've used tons of old-school arcade games in the 80s. They had horrible precision joysticks, guns ("operation wolf"), etc.
(With a Wiimote you can actually develop muscle memory... ah, I need to aim here so I put the remote here, blammo. Trudging a massive hunk of plastic bolted to the cabinet, thus having a restricted range of motion, is just nothing like freely moving a Wiimote. Seriously, if you've got a Wii and you've never tried a "light-gun game" (ironically still called that despite the term being decades obsolete now), pick one up sometime. They're cheap.)
So, at least in my case, my experience directly contradicts your claim that accuracy isn't important for that genre. Also would have to say that when the joystick is not really working correctly, I immediately leave, and when they are working correctly, I don't know what you mean by them being imprecise.
You have to put all the information of your game on the same layer as the controls- meaning your number one concern will be optimizing your interface and controlling the flow of information. It also means that the games you'll be making should be unique to touchscreen- games ported from other platforms are almost always inferior, in part because their design is optimized for a different platform.
That's only one example, but I think the issue is that so many games try to adapt touchscreen to old control methods, rather than create new control methods for touchscreens.
Touch-screen joysticks are appalling - it's very hard to interact with a game when you've got a good deal of the game obscured by your fingers. That being said, I can't think of a better way to do it - those games probably don't belong on phones as phones are seemingly the wrong tool for the job.
I simply uninstall ad rich games, but controls? I've frequently felt the desire to throw my phone against the wall.
Isn't gaming precisely a time diversion?
Phone games surely have the potential to do that, and probably some of them do, but if you look at Bushnell's other works, the restaurants, the Atarti C-380, he was trying to improve social activities via graphics/gaming.
The Nintendo CEO guy has said the same thing with respect to controller design facilitating other people to see how your hands move.
* Competition
* Shared experiences
* Role play
* A way to socialize
"Relaxing Fun" is basically what the GP post was talking about -- a diversion, something you do to pass the time, which is typically not completely passive but mostly so. A lot of sandbox-type games do this well, where you're mostly just sort of looking at the scenery and derping around and having a good time without being particularly threatened or challenged.
"Hard Fun" is nearly the opposite -- it's competition and challenges and stuff that gets your heart rate up. It's "play to 20, win by 2" and you end up finishing 25-23 in a high-stakes match to improve your global rating [0]. It's beating a level in a single life when it used to take you 5 or 10 lives. It's shaving 3 seconds off of your speedrun by perfecting a tricky maneuver.
"Easy Fun" is things like shiny in-game treasure, achievements, even satisfying sounds like the Mario coin pickup sound. It's stuff that makes you smile just for playing and making ordinary progress.
"Social fun" is, of course, anything that connects you with other people -- playing cooperatively or competitively, or even talking about the game outside of the game itself. (I met my wife on a video game BBS 18 years ago.)
[0] A Descent match between two of my friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mq6hyfFAo4&index=2&list=PLo...
For many people, gaming is much more of a hobby that you explicitly set aside time for. I was using "time diversion" in the sense that you are just bored and looking for something to do. That's when I do most of my gaming on my smartphone. If I'm in the mood to specifically do some gaming (as opposed to just killing some time), my smartphone is literally the last device I would use for that purpose.
One of the benefits of games is that the subtitles of the interaction can also be part of the story. A touch screen, unfortunately, offers only a small set of possible interactions, and thus it has a limited toolset for telling interactive stories.
This is important, because we are just learning how to use interaction as a expressive tool. I highly recommend watching Innuendo Studios' "Story Beats"[1]. The first 3 clips are examples, and the last (4th) has the main essay. The thesis is that games offer the storyteller a different set of tools. Video (movies), for example, can generally only access your sympathetic emotions (you feel excited/sad/etc for the character), while interaction allows other emotions to be experience first-hand.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY4f8-eoY0mg...
My cousin's mother gave her a glossy magazine to read a while back, and she tried swiping the pages to turn them.
Just like for classes of games where fast but also precise motions are required, a mouse will beat a controller thumbstick.
Pretty straightforward matters of bandwidth, latency.
Second of all, that metaphor is not true at all. Great works are often improved by working within the limitations of their medium. To claim otherwise is utterly absurd.
(My favorite kind of mobile games are the ones where the game stops until you complete your input: Stickman Golf, Score Hero)
Part of it's because despite Apple's pretty spectacular accelerometer, detecting fine motion is very difficult, and so the amount of "resolution" available to you as a dev is pretty limited. Variation in fine motor control between players also means that you can't necessarily rely on players being able to affect small, precise movements. Motion controls ultimately ended up being low resolution and relied on substantial/large movements of the device.
This is worse on Android, where the quality of the accelerometer varies widely depending on hardware, and getting consistent experiences across a range of devices is nearly impossible.
Add to environmental factors (say, playing the game on a bus, train, or airplane) massively screwing with your accelerometer readings, and the propensity for mobile games to be played in those exact places, and the situation gets worse.
In any case, this leads to fatigue. Turns out holding your phone up and tilting it every which way is a bit tiring.
tl;dr: Because of individual biological variation, hardware limitations, and environmental noise, fine motion control for mobile games didn't work out, at all.